In recent years, the use of DNA evidence to free people from prison has been highly publicized and has altered some perceptions of the criminal justice system. For example, capital punishment in Illinois was put on hold in 2000 by the governor after learning of several inmates being exonerated by postconviction DNAtesting. As of December 2008, a total of 225 people, including some 'death row' inmates previously incarcerated for crimes they did not commit, have been released from prison thanks to the power of modern forensic DNA typing technologies. Many of these wrongfully convicted individuals were found guilty prior to the development of DNA typing methods in the mid 1980s based on faulty eyewitness accounts or circumstantial evidence. Fortunately for the more than 200 individuals exonerated so far by postconviction DNA testing, some items from the crime scenes were preserved in police evidencelockers that after many years could still be used for DNA testing. Results from testing these old crime scene materials successfully excluded them as the perpetrator of the crimes for which they were falsely convicted and imprisoned. Defense attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld launched the Innocence Project in 1992 at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. This nonprofit legal clinic promotes cases where evidence is available for postconviction DNA testing and can help demonstrate innocence. The Innocence Project has grown to include an Innocence Network of more than 40 law schools and other organizations around the United States and Australia. Law students and staff carefully evaluate thousands of requests for DNAtesting to prove prisoners' innocence. In spite of careful screening, when postconviction testing is conducted, DNAtest results more often than not further implicate the defendant. However, the fact that truly innocent people have been behind bars for a decade or more has prompted legislation in a number of states and also at the federal level to fund postconviction DNA testing. The increased use of DNAanalysis for this purpose will surely impact the future of the criminal justice system.
Source:
http://www.innocenceproject.org;
see also Grisham, J. (2006). The innocent man: Murder and injustice in a small town. New York: Doubleday.

Two young girls, Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth, were sexually assaulted and then brutally murdered in 1983 and 1986. Both murders occurred near the village of Narborough in Leicestershire, England, with similar features, leading the police to suspect that the same man had committed both crimes. Under public pressure, police obtained a confession from a local man to killing one of the girls. His blood was compared to semen recovered from the crimescenes. The man's DNA did not match DNA evidence from either crime! Thus, the first forensic application of DNAtechnology was to demonstrate the innocence of someone who might otherwise have been convicted. A mass screening to collect blood for DNA testing from all adult men in three local villages was conducted in a thorough search for the killer. More than 4000 men were tested without a match. About a year later a woman at a bar overheard someone bragging about how he had given a bloodsample for a friend named Colin Pitchfork. The police interviewed Mr. Pitchfork, collected a blood sample from him, and found that his DNA profile matched semen from both murder scenes. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The story behind the first application of forensic DNA typing or genetic fingerprinting, as it was then called, has been welltold in Joseph Wambaugh's The Blooding. The DNA typingmethods used were Alec Jeffreys's multi-locus RFLP probes, which he first described in 1985. Since it was first used more than 20 years ago, DNA testing has progressed to become a sensitive and effective tool to aid in bringing the guilty to justice and in exonerating the innocent. Important lessons from this first forensic application of DNA include (1) the connection of two separate crimes through development and comparison of DNA profiles from the biological evidence in the individual cases, (2) development and use of a DNA database to search for the perpetrator of both crimes, (3) exoneration of an innocent suspect who had apparently confessed to the police, and (4) realization that DNA is merely an investigative tool, because it did not solve the case by itself but rather relied on the confession of an accomplice and further detective work to bring Colin Pitchfork to justice.
Source:
Wambaugh, J. (1989). The blooding. New York: Bantam Books;
http://www.forensic.gov.uk

In early 2007, the news media brought paternity testing into the forefront of the public's attention when a DNAtest was conducted to find the father of a daughter born on 7 September 2006 to a model/actress named Vickie Lynn Marshall - better known as Anna Nicole Smith. Anna Nicole Smith, who had gained fame in the early 1990s as a Playboymodel, died suddenly on 8 February 2007 at the age of 39 from what was deemed an accidental drug overdose. With her untimely death, attention turned to a paternity struggle over her 5-month-old daughter. The child was originally named Dannielynn Hope Marshall Stern with Anna Nicole's former lawyer turned live-in partner Howard K. Stern listed on the birth certificate as the father. However, a number of men came forward claiming to be the father of baby Dannielynn including a European prince, Anna Nicole's bodyguard, and a convict who had been a former boyfriend. A Los Angeles-based entertainment photojournalist Larry Birkheadwas foremost among those who challenged having Howard Stern listed on the birth certificate as Dannielynn's father. After a lengthy legal battle, which took place in the Bahamas where Anna Nicole Smith had been living priorto her death, DNA samples were collected and analyzed to definitively determine the paternity. On 10 April 2007, Dr.Michael Baird, the laboratory director of DNA Diagnostics Center, a paternity testing company near Cincinnati, Ohio, appeared at a Bahamian court to provide DNA testing results. These results, generated with the Identifiler STRkit, gave a probability of paternity of 99.99999% that Larry Birkhead was the biological father of Anna Nicole Smith's daughter Dannielynn. Dannielynn's birth certificate was subsequently updated and her name changed to Dannielynn Hope Marshall Birkhead.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Nicole_Smith
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dannielynn_Birkhead_paternity_case
http://www.dnacenter.com?media/anna-nicole-dna-test.html

The terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001 left over 3000 victims in three different locations: the Pentagon in Washington, DC, a field near Shanksville (Somerset County), Pennsylvania, and the twin towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City. DNA samples from the Pentagon and Pennsylvania sites were processed by the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) while the WTC work was performed by the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner Department of Forensic Biology, the New York State Police, and a number of contract laboratories and consultants. enough to melt the steel support beams and bring down the buildings. Thus, human remains in this pressure cooker were often comingled, very fragmented, and in many cases likely vaporized. Several innovations came out of the 9/11 tragedy. These included new extraction methods from bone, reduced size amplicons or miniSTRs, panels of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and high-throughput mitochondrial DNA sequencing. In addition, new software was developed to aid in matching reference samples and recovered remains as well as associating remains with the same DNA profile. The DNA identification efforts for the WTC victims have become arguably the world’s largest forensic case to date. More than 19,917 pieces of human remains were collected from a pile of rubble weighing over a million tons and extending more than 70 feet (21 m) in height following the crushing collapse of the Twin Towers. The initial removal and sorting of human remains took place between September 2001 and May 2002. However, the primary DNA identification efforts went on for more than 3 years—almost 2.5 years after the last piece of debris had been removed from the WTC site. As of late 2008, more than 1600 victims of the 2749 present when the Twin Towers collapsed had been identified. Without the capabilities of DNA testing, there would have been only a fraction of the victims identified based on other modalities such as fingerprints and dental records. One of the largest challenges from this investigation was review of the massive amounts of data produced by contracting laboratories. More than 52,528 STR profiles, 16,938 SNP profiles, and 31,155 mtDNA sequences were generated in an effort to identify the 2749 victims of the World Trade Center collapse based on 19,917 recovered remains—truly a heroic effort. Most of the data from the recovered remains contained only partial DNA profiles, making it even more difficult to sort through and piece together sufficient information to make a reliable identification. While we hope to never see the likes of another 11 September 2001 terrorist attack, forensic DNA typing laboratories should be prepared to aid in victim identification efforts in future mass fatality incidents. Biological samples recovered from the WTC site had been subjected to extreme pressures with the building collapse and then subterranean fires of 1500°F (815°C) or more for the 3 months following the terrorist attack. The jet fuel from both planes that rammed the WTC towers burned intensely
Sources:
Biesecker, L. G., et al. (2005). DNA identifications after the 9/11 World Trade Center attack. Science, 310, 1122–1123. Shaler, R. C. (2005). Who they were—Inside the World Trade Center DNA story: The unprecedented effort to identify the missing. New York: Free Press.